Sportsmen’s doubles year-end appeal with Kindsight

How a nonprofit tennis club scaled up outreach and expanded their campaigns – without overextending their bandwidth or budget.

Large-scale fundraising campaigns can play a critical role in propelling a nonprofit’s mission forward. But when resources and bandwidth are minimal (sound familiar?), there’s often some give-and-take around what’s possible.

Take Sportsmen’s Tennis & Enrichment Center. The Massachusetts tennis club provides free tennis, academics, and life skills programming for low-income, underserved families in the Boston area, supporting over 5,000 youths and adults annually. 

To fuel their mission, Sportsmen’s engages a robust donor base of paying members who use the facilities as a classic tennis club and individuals who have an affinity for human services and youth development. “Our database has always been a challenge, and understanding who has potential and who has capacity to give can be difficult,” says Mason Bultje, Annual Fund Manager at Sportsmen’s, adding that their diverse base is essential to successfully engaging with them and stewarding them in their journey as donors. 

An added layer: Bultje is half of Sportsmen’s two-person fundraising team. With such a small team, it is essential to make the most of their time and resources. They don’t have time to throw spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks. They need to be very thoughtful and strategic about their tactics and take a targeted approach to reaching donors who have an affinity for their cause and the capacity and propensity to give.

The Challenge: A labour-intensive year-end with moderate results

Historically, Sportsmen’s limited their large-scale campaigning to one major event each year: a fall fundraising gala that drove a substantial portion of their funds for the year. Because of the success of this event, and concerns around donor fatigue and limited bandwidth, the gala took precedence over other campaigns, like a year-end campaign. 

But in 2021, that all changed. Like many nonprofits, Sportsmen’s started to see shifts in giving trends that meant they needed to diversify their campaigns. Suddenly, the already overextended fundraising team saw that to meet their goals, they’d need to find the time and bandwidth to add a year-end campaign as well. 

At first, they took a traditional approach to planning and executing the year-end campaign, to moderate results. Standardized direct mail was sent to their entire database and they raised $75K in the first year and $88K in year two. However, the process was expensive, labor-intensive, and too broad – especially in tandem with their annual gala. Sportsmen’s needed to execute a more efficient year-end campaign that yielded higher results.

The Solution: Modern, targeted outreach with iwave

Bultje knew that a more efficient method to donor engagement needed to start with a more modern approach to prospect research. That’s where iwave came in. After implementing the fundraising intelligence solution in 2023, Sportsmen’s immediately put it to the test for their year-end appeal. 

First, they screened their entire database and were excited to find strong, new prospects within their member pool with the capacity to give. They narrowed down the list to those who had donated within the past two years. Then, they used iwave’s scoring system to find those who had an affinity for both human services and youth development causes. 

With this process, they effectively targeted their outreach. Instead of mailing generic letters to over 2,500 people, they only sent more personal appeals to 700 very strong prospects. And the best part? All this research was done in minutes, not days. The pool of prospects they contacted was a stronger fit for their campaign, and their execution time was cut way down. 

The Outcome: 99% growth in year-end donations

Using this tailored approach, Sportsmen’s was able to contact the right donors and make the right ask. “After using Kindsight’s iwave product to execute our year-end appeal, we went from $88,000 to $175,000 – that’s 99% growth in just one year,” says Bultje.

They doubled their campaign results – while spending less time and energy on outreach. They also fostered more meaningful connections with their base by taking a personalized approach, made possible with the wealth of information they found on their donors. “iwave allows us to have a targeted approach with our campaigns,” Bultje shared. “Instead of sending mass direct mail to thousands of constituents, we can tailor our outreach to a smaller group of individuals who are prime candidates for our campaign.”

Since their first year-end appeal with iwave, Sportsmen’s has used similar approaches for other campaigns. During a recent capital campaign, the fundraising team used iwave to segment their list and get to know their high-capacity donors. They narrowed the list down to see who had the highest capacity to give and then filtered for those who had an affinity for their cause. 

Another example of when this came in handy was for an art gallery event. Sportsmen’s used iwave to search for individuals who not only had an affinity for youth education and sport but also for the arts. This new segmentation made their outreach much more efficient and allowed them to target only candidates with a high likelihood of being interested in the event. 

“In theory, you could do all this grunt work yourself,” says Bultje. “But with Kindsight’s iwave, you have the information and the insights, and you can trust that it will guide you in the right direction.”